Nora Sayre, author of ""Sixties Going on Seventies"" and a National Book Award nominee, continues to explore our century's history as she turns her eye to the dramas of the 1950s. The major figures of the Cold War landscape, such as J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy, are alive in these pages, with a focus on the relation between private lives and public events. She follows some of the luminaries of the mid-century through the best and worst chapters of their lives. There are portraits of James Thurber, Walker Evans, John O'Hara (the author's affectionate godfather until she said he was out of date), Dorothy Parker, and Edmund Wilson (whose friendship with Sayre began over a terrarium when she was eleven). After a postmortem of the Jazz Age generation, Sayre writes about her Harvard contemporaries who came of age in the 1950s, cautious rebels who didn't want to repeat their parents' turbulent history. Moving in and out of the narrative, she is sometimes a participant - as in her amusing memoir of the Poets' Theatre, which anticipated the counterculture to come - and sometimes a listener. Autherine Lucy, the first black student at the University of Alabama, is the subject of one of several ""documentaries"", as are the loyalty oath crisis at Berkeley and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee's assault on ""The New York Times"". Shaped out of memoirs and interviews with those who were investigated, betrayed and blacklisted, this book provides fascinating new material on a period of intense optimism and immense fear, a time when Hollywood was called a ""hotbed of subversion"", when American leftists did their best to endure in a treacherous climate. In many ways, ""Previous Convictions"" tells a hidden history of our times.